What to do?

It was November 6th, the day after we elected Donald J. Trump as President.  Again.  I was sad, a bit confused, afraid of what was to come, unclear about what should be done.  I sat down to write a list of what I thought might be our work in light of this calamity.  

And the first thing I wrote was “Do nothing.”  Maybe it was time to give up.  As a child of the Sixties, I was educated to believe that social action was a personal responsibility.  I have spent the intervening years both practicing policy activism and teaching a couple of generations of students the wisdom of and the need for action.  Maybe it was time to let someone else carry this weight.  A kind of retirement.

That lasted a few minutes.  And then I started to brainstorm the things that we might do.  It turned out to be a longer list than I thought it could be.  Here are those ideas.  I haven’t taken the time yet to think more deeply or complexly about these ideas; they are still the unpolished results of the brainstorm.  But, for me, it’s a start.

First.  Foremost.  Don’t give up.  It is not time for any of us to retire.  We continue to be called to act, and we have to respond to that calling.  But what can we do?  In no particular order:

1.  Work in media.  Not just the mainstream media, but social media, too.  Lost of good stories.  Lots of editorials.  Lots of influencers with liberal ideas and a commitment to social welfare.  Push back against the media who prematurely capitulate.  Support media whose rights have been abridged.  We need to recruit, support and listen to professional communicators.  If our ideas and priorities are not communicated well, they will be meaningless.  And we need to call out, every day, the ridiculousness of the administration’s ideas: “taking” Gaza, incorporating Canada as a state, settling the Russian war of aggression without involving Ukraine or the rest of Europe,  firing the people who guard and maintain our nuclear weapons, cutting off funding for HIV testing and trials in Africa, deporting anyone we feel like, without regard for law or due process.

One problem is that Trump has dominated all media for the last decade.  Bolstered by Fox News and a conservative tilt in social media (see Musk’s X and the capitulation of other social media outlets to Trump’s threats and demands), the MAGA story has been told and retold and retold.  We need to have our own stories told.  Many years ago, as a faculty member running an admissions program at a school of public health, I argued to my colleagues that public health schools needed to have an affirmative action program for professional communicators who wanted to get MPH’s, people who might not otherwise have gotten into the school.  Do you believe that the American public will be largely unmoved by stories of people in need?  Then maybe this program isn’t for you.  But history shows that Americans do react to the stories that they read and hear, that become part of the country’s political culture.  

We have to be really, really good at telling our stories, about the people who will be hurt from the application of reckless chainsaws by Trump and Musk to necessary programs.  People will die, and their stories need to be told.  Outbreaks of infectious diseases will occur in communities insufficiently vaccinated, as with measles in Texas as we speak, and those stories must be told.  HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa was at pandemic levels in the first decade of the 21st Century.  Children were being born infected.  Those who were not infected often were orphans shortly after their birth.  The situation was so bad that one of the most conservative Presidents to serve in my lifetime, George W. Bush, established PEPFAR as a way of channeling tens of millions of dollars in aid for prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa.  This has been a remarkably successful program, administered by USAID and CDC.  Trump’s and Musk’s woodchipper approach will likely kill the program.  Let’s make sure that that story gets told.  Today’s media is starting to find these stories: people who voted for Trump but now are concerned about what he is doing, communities in pain who are collateral damage to Musk’s follies, like Kansas farmers losing billions of dollars in selling their produce for distribution through USAID, and the stories about what is not getting done that needs to be done, if only the White House were paying attention.

2.  A game of inches.  We don’t have to convince a big chunk of MAGA or a majority of Republicans in Congress.  Just a few.  Five embarrassed Republican senators and five embarrassed congresspeople.  No third party candidates for a while.  (Trump barely won the popular vote.  Stein got 628,000 votes. You don’t think there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans?  Make a list of all the Democrats in the House and the Senate, then add all of the Democratic Governors.  Randomly pick two.  Would you rather have those two as Pres/VP over the guys we have?  Of course you would.)  We also have to talk to the Dems who stayed home.  Getting out the vote (GOTV) is critical.  Think we have no chance of scraping off a few votes from MAGA?  Check out what is happening among Mormons in Utah.  A bunch of them voted for Harris; many are organizing around their opposition to MAGA extremism.  Again, we don’t need to change the minds of millions of Mormons and other conservatives.  A game of inches.

3.  Constituents should bother Republicans locally, like after calls for repeal of the ACA.  Do you think local and vocal public pressure doesn’t affect policy and politicians?  Well, when the Republicans campaigned during the off-year elections in 2010, they grossly misstated and overstated what would be the impact of the Affordable Care Act.  And the public reacted.  People were attending town hall meetings held by Democratic congresspeople, shouting about the government’s supposed efforts to destroy healthcare.  This was aided by the Tea Patry movement, secretly funded by conservative rich people, but listened to as if they were legitimate spokespeople for the grassroots.  And, in Obama’s words, the Democrats got shellacked in those elections, losing 63 seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate.  Fast forward to the 2018 midterm election.  The Republicans had control of the White House and both houses of Congress after the 2016 elections.  They wanted to repeal Obamacare.  But by 2018 the public had learned more about the actual workings of the ACA and reacted to the Republicans’ threats and efforts to repeal it.  In a reversal from 2010, many, many angry people showed up at town hall meetings arguing to protect the ACA.  Their participation made the national and local news.  The Democrats gained 40 seats in the House.  Already, people are showing up at town halls held by Republicans and forcefully demanding an explanation for what is happening today in DC.  There is every reason to believe that the 2026 midterms will be a turning point in this current national disgrace.  We can never abandon fights at the national level, but we have to support local efforts, particularly when the media is willing to show up and show what is happening in our own communities.

4.  Support lawyers in court actions.  Still remember all of those anti-lawyer jokes that were popular a few decades ago, when it benefited the business and insurance communities to run national efforts to get us to devalue the role of lawyers in our society?  Time to realize that a strong democracy needs a strong “Rule of Law,” and that a strong Rule of Law requires strong lawyers fighting on our behalf for righteous public policies.  Back in 1972, when I told people I was going to law school, people were impressed and supportive.  Today, my students who want to go to law school are a bit embarrassed.  Enough of that.  (Always ask yourself the important question “Cui bono?”  Who benefits?  Who benefits from your lack of respect for lawyers?  Right. . . the rich and powerful!)  For the foreseeable future, we will need to rely heavily on a variety of lawyers, like state attorneys general, governmental lawyers, civil rights attorneys, other public interest lawyers, our own personal lawyers bringing civil cases on our behalf against the misdeeds of those with power.

5.  Support your state’s attorney general.  Many of the dozens of court cases brought against Trump in the last month were brought by state attorneys general.  We often don’t pay much attention to these “lawyers for the people.”  But they will be more and more important in protecting us from the worst of the current craziness.  What impact could they have?  Well, I spent much of the 1970's working against the tobacco industry here in Illinois.  And I found little success.  I felt like my job was basically to throw myself under moving trucks.  Th governor of Illinois at the time, Jim Thompson, who wanted to be President some day, vetoed the “Public Smoking Act,” an incredibly innocuous bill that I crafted and guided through the Illinois General Assembly.  We were working with his staff on a signing ceremony until he met with the Tobacco Institute (the bad guys) in the Governor’s Mansion, after which he filed a hand-written veto message.  

But fast forward to the late 1990's, and a couple of dozen state attorneys general brought a class action against the entire tobacco industry, which resulted in the “Master Settlement Agreement.”  Billions of dollars became available for anti-smoking efforts, and the Tobacco Institute, my old adversary, was ultimately put out of business. A joint effort by state attorneys general fought the big banks after the 2008 Great Recession to claw back some of their profits to help their victims.  These exact approaches are being done today, with some hope-giving early results.  Never thought to work for the election of a strong attorney general?  Maybe this is the moment to rethink that.

6.  Who becomes a judge?  I have been saying for decades that “the Supreme Court is on the ballot.”  Well, now everyone who is paying attention understands that.  Backed by wealthy conservatives, the Federalist Society was formed in 1982 by conservative law students at elite law schools, complaining about the liberal bias of their faculty and fellow students.  (Is it our fault that the truth has a well-known liberal bias?)  It has been wildly successful in changing the US Supreme Court and some of the US appellate courts.  Similar successes have been seen in state judicial systems.  In states where judges are elected, we are going to have to muster political support for the election of liberal judges.  (We see you, Wisconsin.)  Where judges are appointed, a candidate for governor must be questioned about the kinds of judges he or she will appoint, and we will have to vote accordingly.  In 2026, 36 gubernatorial races will be held, with Democrats and Republicans each holding 18 governorships.  The make up of state judiciaries will be on the ballot, as will the federal judiciary in the Presidential race in 2028.  We are seeing today that the courts are one of the most important checks against an out of control presidency.  We will all have to vote as if this check and balance is threatened, as it definitely will be.

7.  Bolster our civil rights.  How dare Musk’s barely post-pubescent henchmen gather information on all of us from the federal government’s files.  These are not legitimate agents of our democratic government.  These are not people with a vetted and serious claim to being trustworthy of this information.  Or even having a verified need for it.  They are just being grabby, with the hope that what they find might be used against some of us in the future.  And how could any court let them do that?  And we are now shipping people off to retention in Guantanamo, where we kept incommunicado and tortured the worst of the 9/11 terrorists.  And we have plans for putting some of these people in army bases all over the country.  Some of these people probably deserve to be deported.  But some of them have a legitimate right to remain here.  For all we know, a chunk of them may be American citizens.  This is what “due process” is all about.  It allows us to separate out the legitimate actions of the government from its illegitimate actions and gives the people involved the ability to actively participate in the processes of deciding which is good government and which is a violation of our rights.  This is a fight worth fighting because of the importance to our democracy of protecting our civil rights from encroachment by a too powerful government.  (That was the whole point of the Bill of Rights!)  But it is also a winning argument among a fairly large chunk of Americans.  

8.  Find leaders who can arouse a “migdala” reaction.  I happened to be having lunch with a former student of mine, Dr. Sagar Shah, the day after the November election.  I shared with him my view that this election was lost because Trump was able to arouse passion in a large number of people, and that the Democrats weren’t trying to do that.  Sagar, ever the thoughtful doctor,  characterized this as a “migdala” reaction, referring to that part of the brain that mediates passion and high emotion.  

I have already written on this: “This Election Showed the Power of Passion Over Reason,” https://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2024/11/this-election-showed-power-of-passion.html
Trying to fight a passionate candidate with a reasonable candidate is like bringing the cliche knife to a gunfight.  We need to find leaders who can arouse passion.  Nope, not Biden.  Not Harris.  Not Obama. Not Newsom.  All good people, but they are too much reason, not enough passion.  We need more people like Bernie Sanders.  Maybe AOC, Cory Booker, Jasmine Crockett, Jamie Rankin, Raphael Warnock, Josh Shapiro?  Let’s find those kinds of leaders and follow them.

9.  Block, delay, obstruct.  I know this doesn’t sound like the “proper thing to do.”  But we have spent the last ten years letting Trump build a constituency and a political infrastructure, and it is going to take some time for our countermeasures to start working.  Eight-two percent of Senate Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  They voted unanimously for the Clean Air Act in 1970.  But how many of them voted for the Affordable Care Act?  Zero.  Not a single Republican vote in either House.  And during Trump’s first term, the Senate fell only one vote short of passing a law that would have repealed the ACA, without any clear plan for its replacement.  (An early example of Trump’s “concept of a plan.”)

When Obama took office, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Leader in the Senate, promised to make him a one term president.  That, of course, didn’t work, but the promise was based on the notion that obstruction is a good tactic.  McConnell refined this idea when he obstructed the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, using the completely ahistorical argument that it was in the last year of a presidency (and then rushed through the appointment Amy Coney Barrett just a few days before the 2020 election).  Want to be seen as thoughtful and reasonable?  Sorry, another knife at a gunfight.  Should we be as unreasonable and inconsistent as the Republicans have been.  Of course not; we still have to live with ourselves.  But within the bounds of some level of decency, when we can block, delay or obstruct what Trump, Musk, DOGE and MAGA are doing, let’s do it.

10.  Write reports, find experts.  I am convinced that just “being right” is not going to win.  We have to be willing to fight and fight hard.  We will need to do studies, write reports and develop expertise on our full range of concerns.  Universal healthcare, prevention leading to better health status, a clean and healthy environment, international peace within a peaceful world order, the importance of immigration in a shrinking country, and, probably above all, climate change.   But I just listened to an interview on PBS of Michael Knowles.  Knowles is a young, tireless apologist for Trump and Musk and MAGA.  He came to first attention when he published a book on why you should pay attention to Democratic policies, which turned out to be a couple of hundred completely empty pages.  (At the time, it was taken as a charming thrust at his opponents, but in retrospect seems like a harbinger of his general approach, as they say in Texas, “lots of hat, no cattle.”)  

You’ve seen this act before: apparently erudite, charming, a bit of self-deprecating humor, a ready and practiced argument for any topic, and always armed with a “recent study.”  Has the interviewer read that study?  Of course not.  Do we know what it actually says?  Nope.  I have found, in reacting to this particularly slick kind of advocate that when you actually look at the study, you are not impressed by it, usually for many reasons.  But if we are going to go to battle with the Knowles of the world, we have to have reports to cite, and experts for the media to interview.  As I have said before, being right and reasonable is not sufficient to win the kind of fight we are in.  But it is necessary, both to win and to maintain our sense of dignity.  Of course, MAGA will always claim that what we say is just “wokeness,” but I believe that having a strong foundation in science and morality will, in the long run, win out.  We just have to stay afloat during that “long run.”

11.  Offer specific explanations.   We need to pick our battles.  I think it would make the most sense to focus on specific battles, not those with broad policy scope.  Specific battles are more understandable.  And when we win one, it is easier to explain the benefits to Americans.  I also believe we need to develop arguments about specific reasons for what we are currently doing and what the other side is trying to do.  For instance, current governmental programs are often a response to economic injustice, to market systems that have unintended collateral damage.  We are just using the government to remedy those wrongs.  But why has that happened?  Because some 60 years ago, conservatives brought forth the idea that markets were the only really good way to distribute resources.  We can call this “Neoliberalism.”  (Want a couple of primers on this?  Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” from 1980 and William Ryan’s rejoinder,“Equality” from 1981.)  Today, anything that involves government is condemned by conservatives as “socialism,” even when it is clearly not.  This is just simplistic, ignorant name-calling.

We need to publicize the more ordinary reason for government action, usually a result of the market’s inability to do its work without collateral damage.  Some DEI programming is problematic to defend; there is very little evidence that all of the DEI training actually works.  But the underlying problem that such efforts are trying to address, deeply ingrained structural prejudice, is a strong argument for such action.  I have been addressing this in my classes with a lecture called “We Did This: Finding Structural Racism in History.”  Slavery, Dred Scott, indigenous schools, Tuskegee, red-lining, implicit bias, the Compromise of 1876, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, little kids with racist thoughts, current anti-immigration policies.  If I know the specific historical antecedents, I will better understand the policy choices before us.

12.  Many other things.  There are many other things we should start doing.  How about pursuing state level criminal charges against politicians?  Supporting domestic and international NGO’s with money, experts, publicity.  Keeping track of all of the misdeeds that the current administration is committing.  Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone” makes responding more difficulty, but over time we need to be clear what all was done, so lists and databases are going to be important.  And we need to know not just what was done, but what have been the consequences of all of these wrong-doings.

13.  A coalition of the sane.  I think, over time, a powerful coalition will coalesce.  It will arise out of the actions we take, our need to stay in touch with each other, and our desire to reach out.  This will end up being a coalition of the hopeful, since doing any of the above things will require hope in the future and our ability to affect it positively.  It will be a coalition of the angry.  My law partner, Rick Schoenfield, always taught me that you don’t get to let your anger show unless you think it would be tactically successful.  This is the time for that.  I am angry.  Everyone I know is angry.  And finding out that we are not alone in that anger is nourishing and will bind us closer to together.  

This will also need to be a coalition of the passionate.  As I said above, passion will need to be a large portion of our message and our style.  It will be a coalition of the righteous.  I think most (though clearly not all) MAGA citizens think they are doing something Good.  We need to be morally clear about our policy goals and the means we choose to pursue them.  And it must be a coalition of the sane.  Enough of craziness or incoherence, of lies, of inconsistencies, of fabulous and confabulated conspiracies.  We need to be the heirs to the generations of thoughtful and passionate defenders of democracy that brought us all to these occasions.

OK, that’s all I have thought of so far.  What else should we be doing?

What do i tell my students?

[First posted on Bluesky, February 5, 2025.  @danswartzman.bsky.social]

I try to teach my students about the future of American social justice. What am I to make of Trump's plans: cutting scores of necessary federal programs which benefit millions to keep tax cuts for the rich and powerful,

Empowering an unstable, unaccountable gazillionaire to decide who gets to work for the government, mindless of the necessary expertise and experience,

Ham-handedly reversing years of governmental efforts to undo centuries of immoral practices that favored old, white, male majorities,

Proposing to ignore the clear language of the Constitution he took an oath to protect and defend by heedlessly declaring who is and is not a citizen and by impounding money duly authorized by Congress,

By proposing land grabs (Canada, Greenland, Panama, Gaza, and who knows where else) that would be shocking to 19th and 20th Century sensibilities,

By appointing unqualified, inappropriate, fanatical sycophants to be the administrators and guardians of our and our children's futures.

The montrousness of these plans are not unparalleled in US history (Manifest Destiny, slavery, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, Secession, Jim Crow, red-lining, the Vietnam War, etc.). But they are nevertheless shocking.

And this is only the first couple of weeks of this administration. What do I tell my students? This isn't the way it is supposed to be. We have to react. We have to speak out. We have to fight back. We have to find and follow courageous leaders.

Me, I'm starting a list of the things we need to do, and the legal, political and morally responsible levers available to us. Any suggestions will be gratefully appreciated.

Jews believe we are part of a partnership responsible for repairing the world (tikkun olam). And we tell a story of a desperate man who complains to God, "why have You done nothing to fix this troubled world," to which God replies, "I did do something. I sent you."

We are the people sent to repair the world. This is who we have always been. It's time to get back to work.

Aren't we over-reacting to the maternal mortality rate?

 

From a brief zoom interaction with my colleague, Holly Mattix-Kramer, earlier today on maternal mortality rates:

Reacting to your posting in the chat, Holly, it is a source of great sadness that a woman should die becoming a mother.  If my wife, sister, daughter was the woman who died, this would be the biggest tragedy in my entire life. 

But thinking about this from the standpoint of the community as a whole, maternal mortality is a small blip on the screen of preventable deaths in the US.

In 2022, the MMR was 22.3/100,000.  That is a total of 817 deaths.  OK, so I picked a low year.  So in 2021 MMR was 32.9/100,000, which is 1204 deaths.  And the highest number I could find on how many of those deaths might be preventable was 80%.  That is 963 in 2021 and 654 in 2022.  Why the variability with MMR?  I am not a statistician, but I bet the fact that we are dealing with a small base of numbers is an important factor; wouldn’t this make slight differences look very large?

Motor vehicle accidents in 2022 were 42,514.  That is 65 times higher than maternal deaths that year.

Kidney disease deaths (hitting you where you live, Holly) in 2022 were 57,987.  That’s 89 times higher than maternal deaths.

And remember that, even though we are properly focused on the differential between white and Black moms, the number of Black moms who die is an even smaller number.  About 1/7^th of all births in the US are to Black moms.  Around 500,000.  If the Black MMR is 3 times the total MMR, then it is 66.9/100,000.  (I know that isn’t right, because we should multiply by the white births, but I don’t know that number.)  That means about 67 time 5, or 335 Black moms die.  Again, a terrible, unspeakable tragedy, but an even smaller number from a public policy standpoint, particularly if only 80% are preventable, which lowers the number to 268.

Yes, I know that every preventable death is worth saving, but I am not arguing we do nothing about this.  I am just arguing that we take into account that how much money and energy and attention we allocate to MMR should be at least roughly proportional to the size of the problem.  About 480,000 people in the US still die from smoking.  That’s 1,315 per day, higher than the maternal death number for the entire year of 2021.

Yet our colleagues in public health continue to rank MMR as a huge problem deserving of the designation of a “crisis.” 

I usually start this discussion in my classes by asking the class how many people have to die from a disease, condition or life event before we start really focusing on it and spending a lot of money to lower it.  The consensus is usually 10,000.  Maternal mortality isn’t anywhere near that.

I am not saying we shouldn’t put some focus on MMR.  And we should definitely focus on the disparities between Black and white mothers.  But in my opinion, we are over-reacting to the problem as a whole.  Beyond my opinion that we are over-reacting to this problem, there is also the point I tried to raise with the student today.  Something with a small “n” is not a very good thing to use as our outcome measure to address poor access to maternal care.  There will be too much variability, and at some point some one opposed to putting more money into caring for poor, Black moms, is going to do the math and say “this isn’t that big a problem.” 

So, we should look for more compelling measures to highlight the problem of maternal care deserts.  Numbers of primary care docs per population served?  Numbers of dollars spent on maternal care per population served?  Money spent on FQHC’s?  Maybe some measure of morbidity?  Extra money spent on intensive care?  I don’t know what would be best to use; this is not my expertise.  But the people with the expertise keep insisting this is a crisis!

That would have been a much more interesting and compelling result of the policy analysis presented. 

OK, thanks for listening.  I feel better now.

DS

PS, Don’t get me started on K-12 school shooting deaths.  Between 1999 and 2022, this number has peaked at 50, with most years well below that.  https://www.security.org/blog/a-timeline-of-school-shootings-since-columbine/.  Yet we have produced an entire generation of children, whom we routinely run through gun detectors to get to their classrooms, scared to death of going to school.  In some of those 23 years, more people died of lightening strikes than being shot at school.  I get that the media blows this sort of thing up, but too many public health experts are doing the same.  ds

 

This election showed the power of passion over reason

I am still processing this election, but I have a few preliminary thoughts.

Passion not reason

Overall, I don't think this was a fight over policy or rational positions.  Trump won because he stirred up passion among a lot of unhappy people, a lot of angry people, and among another group who wanted to believe passionately in "someone," maybe "anyone." The key is "passion," not raciocination.

My friend Sagar, a doctor and former student of mine, said this was an amygdala election, not a cerebral one.  Another friend, Alan, who is a psychologist, likened this idea to “the reflexive response seen in youth challenged by complex trauma.”  Simply put, we are not talking about executive function-like decision-making.  It is emotions, like anger and rapture, not reason.  Something more akin to spirituality, with the many associations between Trump and God as evidence.

So, if that is true, then Harris lost the election the day she announced, because nothing she did or could have done would have evoked greater passion than did Trump. He got people from around the country moving in his direction.  Best results for a Republican in Chicago in decades! All the recriminations against the Democrats are misguided. To use the old cliche, we brought a knife to a gunfight.  And if you scan the likely Democratic candidates for President, it seems clear that none of them could have beaten Trump this year.

It couldn’t have been reasoned analysis that led to his 75 million votes; Trumps biggest positions were patently refutable.

Undocumented immigrants

There aren't 25 million undocumented, and removing the ones who exist will sink agriculture, construction and hospitality. Plus he killed the bipartisan immigration bill.  And study after study shows, contrary to Trump’s dark scenarios, that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than citizens.  But people who cared about immigration were passionate, and Trump incited that. Not reason. Passion.

Inflation

Inflation, caused almost entirely by the pandemic, peaked at 9.1% in July 2022. It started dropping soon thereafter and is down to 2.1% now (without a recession!). But prices didn't come down, on eggs or rents or a dozen other things people buy every month. So people blame the Dems for causing the high prices (they didn't) and not lowering them (no one knows how to do that). "Aaargh! Look at that grocery bill!"  First Biden, then Harris, talked sense on this, but were met with vivid anger and sadness, not thoughtfulness.

Tariffs

Raising tariffs has sounded simple for centuries, and people feel passionately about fighting economic wars with other countries, with "those goddamn foreigners."  

You can argue logically that high tariffs have never worked and have repeatedly caused severe problems, like more inflation. All you get is passionate shouting in return. Trump led those shouts.

Climate change

Climate change is good science, and that science has been presented by lots a calm discourse by our leaders and pundits. But "drill, baby, drill" is a battle cry. Trump led his followers in that passionate cry and they followed him, amygdalae aflamed.

The “good old days”

More than 1,000,000 Americans died because of Trump's failures in responding to COVID. And one of the very few things he positively championed was tax cuts for the rich, decidedly not in the interest of most of his voters. Yet many of his voters remember his first four years as a wonderful time in the country's history. What did we liberals do?  We offered rational arguments based on solid history, sound science and powerful economic analysis. And, of course, we utterly failed in the face of the passionate memories of that great first Trump term.

Nothing we could do

Nope, there was nothing we could do. Harris was a very strong candidate if this had been an ordinary election. But she was totally out of her league in a hard fought contest of passion over reason.  As would have been any other likely Democrat.

If all of this is accurate, and whoever comes after Trump is as good a rabble-rouser as he was, then we have to find our own purveyor of passion and then come together around a set of values we can champion to fight against the anger, selfishness, and resentment that Trump stoked. I am open to thoughts about who that might be. But I think it is a pretty short list.  

Maybe the next election (if we get to have one) will go back to the standard contest of a mix of emotions, values and reasoned policy discourse. But a roused rabble seldom settles quickly.

Death begets death

 After the despicable attack on southern Israel and the evil brutality that Hamas perpetrated, I was enraged.  I wanted Israel to fight back, I still do.  But I am coming to understand that the lust for vengeance is a cycle.  That killing, however justified, only results in more killing.

Death begets death.  Death does not beget life.  Death only begets more death.  It doesn’t lead to hope, to joy, to justice, to peace.  Just more death.

This is a lesson that Hamas will learn.  And it is a lesson that my fellow leftists need to learn before they champion the horrible deaths of thousands of innocent people.

And it is a lesson that the Israel government will have to someday learn.  If they kill large numbers of Gazans, aside from the moral problems of doing this, they will beget rage and anger which will result in more attacks, more rockets, more brutality.  More death.

But what if we could kill all of the Hamas fighters?  Well, that is probably not possible.  They aren’t wearing uniforms or badges.  They have had years to plan their hiding.  We will miss quite a few.  And they will organize more followers to come after us and kill us.  

But even if we could kill almost all of them, their fathers, their mothers, their brothers, their sons and their daughters will rage against us.  So will their grandchildren.  And they will all try to kill us.  More death.

And their rage and anger is useful to evil people in the world, who will support them, finance them, train them, equip them.  And derive power and treasure from their rage and the killing it produces.

Peace is not produced by the waging of war.  Centuries of war demonstrate that.  If we want peace, we will have to wage peace.  If we want justice, we will have to work towards justice. Both of those paths are hard.  Hard to see, hard to tred.  But killing only begets more killing.  Death begets death.

Isn't it time to exercise some control over young techies?

 [The following is a slightly expanded version of a recent tweet.]

Am I getting too old to have an opinion like this? Young techies, working in glass palaces w/ free lunches (we know better) & ping pong in the lobby, think they are helping the world. But they are just making it more and unnecessarily complicated, beyond our capabilities and our social systems to cope.

Driverless cars kill people in ways the techs didn’t foresee. They expect drivers to pay attention while the program runs!  Don’t they know any actual drivers? How many people will have to die before we accept that human consciousness is a necessary part of using machines safely?

I am a computer nerd. I bought my first computer in 1981, and I have been tinkering with the hardware and software of my desktops and laptops ever since.  I have been word-processing for 40 years. But I can’t intuit anymore how to make new software work. It does more than earlier versions and is certainly more complicated, but I can do less with it because I can’t figure out how to do the things I need to do.

These kids in Silicon Valley are fixated on artificial intelligence and machine learning, with only passing lip service to the potential negative consequences.  And it stands to reason, if there is artificial intelligence, there will be artificial stupidity.  Who will be responsible?  The companies ask to be relieved of liability in case something bad happens.  Isn’t the fear of losing lawsuits one of the few things that might keep us safe from their hubris?

Tech-obsessed youth, giddy about the profits they can make off of their addictive software, creating algorithms that they don’t fully understand, reaping billions of dollars, with no sense that our irresistible attraction to their lures ultimately will make us sad, sick, sleepless, lonely.

They hook little girls with Instagram posts that undercut self-esteem and maybe heighten the chances of suicide.  Many of their customers are hooked on social media programs, spending hours scrolling their lives away.  Do the techies care?  It makes them obscenely rich, as they sell our attention to the highest bidders.

We have let these children design our future, not for the betterment of our lives, but for their own immense greed. With no forethought, planning or oversight. Maybe it is too late.  Maybe the monsters they created are already eating us alive. No, we shouldn’t give up. We just need some grown-ups to step in and take away their toys.

Accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law Section of the American Public Health Association

 On October 24th I was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law Section of the American Public Health Association.

Here is the nomination statement from Marjorie Jaski, JD, MPH:

Attorney Daniel Swartzman
Nominee for APHA Law Section Lifetime Achievement Award

My nomination of Dr. Daniel Swartzman is derived from my time as his student at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, my continued association with Dr. Swartzman, and witness to his extensive following and influence on some of our brightest leaders today in Public Health as well as his lifelong career in public health law.

Professor Daniel Swartzman became an environmental public interest lawyer in the 1970’s, after graduating from Northwestern Law School and serving as Director of Legal Services for the Chicago Lung Association, working on issues in Illinois and nationally.  Upon receiving his MPH in Environmental Health Sciences in 1978, he also joined the faculty of University of Illinois (UIC) School of Public Health.  

At the School of Public Health, Dr. Swartzman taught some of the earliest classes in the country on public health advocacy and public health ethics, and, today, he is the most awarded teacher in the School’s history in this area.  During his tenure at UIC, he also served as Associate Dean of the School, and his book on cost-benefit analysis and environmental regulations has been widely reviewed and sits in more than 350 libraries around the world.  He has presented widely in conferences, including 20 abstracts at APHA, and in international settings. He started a joint JD/MPH program between UIC and the Chicago-Kent College of Law, and is currently working on a similar program with Loyola’s Health Law program.  His academic work has focused on environmental law, public policy making and social justice.  

Concurrent with Dr. Swartzman’s academic work, he opened his own law practice in 1985 focusing on toxic torts and private brownfield reclamations.  His law firm has been the only Chicago firm that took a cigarette manufacturer to a federal jury verdict, and he has helped close brownfield sites worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  His legal work has been influential in implementing the Clear Air Act Amendments, the work of the National Air Conservation Commission and the National Clear Air Coalition.

Over many years, Dr. Swartzman has helped advise more than two dozen student dissertations and served as advisor to hundreds of MPH students, at least 20 of whom were lawyers or who went on to law school.  In 2017, a group of former students started a campaign raising an endowment of over $100,000 for the “Daniel Swartzman Lecture in Public Health Ethics” at UIC.  He continues his work at Loyola’s new Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health, where he teaches both graduate and undergraduate students.  He advises undergraduate students on becoming lawyers.  He is busy developing teaching case studies focusing on social justice issues which Parkinson hopes to make widely available.

After a highly distinguished career in public health law, that continues to this day, I believe that Daniel Swartzman is an ideal candidate and highly worthy recipient of this award. 

And here are my remarks on accepting the award:

My remarks on receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award
from the APHA Law Section
October 24, 2021

    This is a humbling experience.  I look at the previous recipients of this award, and I think “It is their work that my work is built upon.  These are the shoulders on which my achievement, such as it is, stands.”  With us tonight is the first recipient of this award, Scott Burris, and I am honored to be here with you, Professor Burris.  And I think about a couple of dozen people in our field who deserve this award more than I do.  Of course, I am not going to tell you who those people are, because I don’t want you to change your mind.

    You know, when I graduated from law school, back in 1975, I realized that one can take pride in how well one does their work and in what the work actually is.  But for many lawyers, that second part is not all that easy.  I know so many lawyers who have worked for decades, and have taken pride in how well they lawyer, but not necessarily in what the lawyering accomplished.  But I wanted to be a lawyer for Good things.  And I am sure all of you here tonight know exactly how that feels, because you all want to be lawyers for Good things.  As a public interest lawyer and then as a lawyer for people harmed by toxic chemicals and as a lawyer who helped people clean up polluted land, what we call “brownfields,” I am proud of what I have done.  But there is always that question in the back of your mind, is it enough?  Have I contributed enough?

    Then, a few years later, I became a teacher, teaching public health graduates and undergraduates how to work towards Good things.  Many of you are teachers.  You see your students learning and you can see by the tests scores that they understand the material.  But have you really helped them build careers to achieve what we Jews call “tikkun olam,” repairing the world?  I know that the professors here tonight understand the doubt that I am expressing.

    But four years ago, a large group of my former students worked together to collect more than $100,000 to endow a lectureship on public health ethics in my name at the UIC School of Public Health.  OK, I thought, I probably was doing some Good with those folks.

    And tonight, by being recognized by you, my peers, for my 46 years of practice and teaching and writing, I am being offered an acknowledgment that, yes, maybe what I have been doing was worthwhile, that I really did achieve something.  

    For that statement from you, I am very, very grateful.  Thank you so much for this honor.